Casual wear becomes more fashionable. For example, T-shirts having colorful well-designed characters and marks printed thereon are popular. Sportswear also becomes colorful. For example, baseball uniforms bear numbers on the back. Clothing items for tennis, golf, swimming, aerobics and wind surfing bear attractive characters and marks thereon.
These characters and marks printed on such clothing items are generally planar. In order that such patterns be more fashionable or attractive, it is recently desired for marks and designs to have a thickness, that is, to provide an impasto or raised or three-dimensional pattern. A common practice is to attach a shaped piece of thick fabric to clothing fabric. Since most sportswear uses stretchable fabric, pieces to be attached thereto are also required to be stretchable. At present, pieces of rubber each cut to a shape are bonded to the fabric base with a hot-melt adhesive. This method, however, requires a step of cutting rubber to one or more pieces having a desired shape of character or symbol to collectively form a certain mark. The cutting step yields a quantity of waste rubber. This results in an increased cost.
It was proposed to print a room temperature vulcanizable silicone rubber to fabric as disclosed in Japanese Patent Publication (JP-B) No. 17715/1978. This method, however, requires a long time to cure and is thus unsuitable for commercial use.
Swimming caps of silicone rubber are made fashionable by printing marking ink to the cap surface by a screen printing technique. Few ink prints can be thick or impasto. One proposal for producing a sterographic feel is by engraving a mold to define a three-dimensional pattern of character or mark, pouring marking ink into the engraved mold, and transferring the ink molding to a swimming cap under pressure as disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Kokai (JP-A) No. 312110/1988. This method requires engraving of a mold for every pattern, resulting in an increased cost.